So jook
joints, as a part of the cycle of cultural movement, as a key institution
that blacks could rely on for private and autonomous space, were important
to understanding the labor experience. How did this translate in Marion
Post Wolcott's images? To get at how, as a photographer, she might have
consciously or unconsciously brought these concerns into her photos of
Belle Glade jook joints, requires a shift in direction. As a photographer,
her task was to translate subject interests into visual terms; we have
to change frameworks accordingly.

In Paul
Hendrickson's biography of Marion Post Wolcott, there is a section where
he describes going through piles of her photos with her, many years after
she took them, when she was an elderly woman. They come to an image of
four young black cotton pickers that she took in Mississippi in 1939.
Of the photograph, she says:

These
Negro boys. Their bodies are so beautiful, the way they're draped
along this wooden bench. Look at how natural their clothing is. It
just seems to flow off their bodies. This one here is like a dancer.
I suppose that's what I saw, what I wanted to shoot. It was how elegant
they were without really knowing it. (Hendrickson 261)

Looking at
the
image, we can see how this vision translated into the composition.
The lines of their bodies are languorous, the sensation of their leaning
against the bench almost tangible. There is a real physical weightiness
to the image. In visual terms, what she says about the boys' dancerliness
makes a lot of sense- when we consider the literal content of the image,
however, it can seem a bit absurd. The boys are leaning against the bench
because they are tired; it is the end of the day and they are waiting
for their pay. In one sense, the drape of their bodies is elegance. In
another, it is the material reality of their lives; young, dirty, laboring.